London is the tops for street art, says Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey spoke to the Evening Standard while painting his largest-ever mural, a 42-metre-high stencil encouraging free speech, at the London Pleasure Gardens, a huge new ?oasis of urban culture? which opens near City Airport this weekend.

?Bansky is an old friend, and the energy he has created around public art in London has affected the entire scene,? said the 42-year-old, who is the US?s most famous guerrilla painter.

?This is a great city for street art because it?s densely populated and a lot of people walk, so they can stumble across something, stop and look at it.?

Fairey said that the chance to work on the side wall of the derelict Millennium Mill at Pontoon Dock, visible to departing planes and Olympics visitors to the ExCel Centre, was a gift. But high winds and rain had made painting difficult. ?I?m from Southern California, so I?m spoiled,? he said.

The new art includes the image of wrestler Andre the Giant that has appeared in Fairey?s work since his earliest, illegal tagging campaigns in 1989 ? often alongside the word ?Obey?. ?I wanted to encourage people to question everything, their obedience to authority,? said Fairey. The father-of-two has been arrested 19 times, most recently in 2009, despite his unofficial association with Mr Obama.

Of his most famous design, Fairey said: ?I?m proud of the Obama image as a piece of grassroots activism that wasn?t commissioned by the campaign. I thought Obama would be a subversive delivery vehicle for a lot of progressive ideas. Of course I?m not going to do anything like that for Obama this time because you can?t replicate the optimism people had for him as an unknown quantity.?

The London Pleasure Gardens, which can host 35,000 people, opens on Saturday with the weekend-long Paradise Gardens Festival of free theatre, music and art, and a huge fireworks display.

The mostly open-air site also features a double-decker bus, two aeroplane nose-cones and several billboards decorated by street artists including Risk, Ron English and TrustoCorp.

Many of the US artists will be showing work at Black Rat Projects in Rivington Street, Shoreditch, from July 4, marking Independence Day.
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www.londonpleasuregardens.com
www.blackratprojects.com

Source: http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/london-is-the-tops-for-street-art-says-shepard-fairey-7898971.html

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